School is not an Option

This weekend an unholy trio of Arne Duncan, Newt Gingrich, and Al Sharpton were doing the talk show circuits and were being interviewed on Meet the Press. There Arne Duncan proclaimed,
Unfortunately, what Duncan and his cohorts are promoting is a federal extortion scheme that extends the terror tactics of No Child Left Behind into the Obama administration's growing list of education campaign lies and distortions.

When Duncan refers to 48 states coming together he is lying because this "coming together" is coerced, the rhetotic Orwellian. Later in the broadcast we learn how these 48 states are being held virtual hostages to this triumvirate's misguided mission:


Driving this dystopic public education genocide are a perfect storm of malicious and disingenuous forces. This includes technology plutocrats who thinly disguise their education marketeering and consumer conditioning ambitions as philanthropy and their doctored educational studies as factual proof of education gaps and Chicken Little global competitive collapse.

Obama compounds the problem with his urban folk myth that schools are failing, 'bad' teachers are ubiquitous, the yearly ever-higher standards are never high enough, and so on. He ran on this steaming bucket of pseudo-scientific nonsense and has surrounded himself with the political
opportunists who want to capitalize on Obama's myopic hubris.

The Race to the Top is little more than a race to pick the pockets of the taxpayer before anyone asks what the smell is and where the money went.

The formulation of this policy and its administration is brought to us by the same Clinton administration hacks who dismantled welfare with little more than cosmetic changes in tone. The phrase Welfare Queen is now teacher. The destination remains the same. Put them out on the street.

At the service level, the Race to the Top is all about race politics. The demonization of public schools and teachers as the cause of poverty, violence, and ignorance is a popular theme that never gets old with the urban, ultra-conservative, get tough audience.

The Race to the Top continues to entangle and strangle suburban schools in the rhetoric and paradox of a standardized test fueled cottage industry that manufactures achievement gaps between wildly different and unique children. It is a cash cow that keeps on giving (Ask any taxpayer).

The sum of all of this is the continued degradation of educational quality in America. As our taxes are squandered on federal programs that make no sense, have no destination, and tolerate no criticism or opt-out, schools remain toxic and tragic hostages to both Republican and Democratic madmen whose unrelenting shared belligerence is killing this country.